Exclusive: Ali Hatem Suleimani tells Telegraph he will not break his military
alliance with Isis to help form a united Sunni-Shia government while Nouri
al-Maliki remains Iraqi prime minister

The leader of Iraq’s biggest tribe has refused to break his military alliance with the Islamist extremist group, Isis, saying he will march a hundred thousand men on Baghdad if Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, does not step down.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Ali Hatem Suleimani distanced himself from Isis’s sectarian massacres but rejected demands that he break with the group and help form a united Sunni-Shia government.

“We can fight Isis and al-Qaeda whenever we want to,” he said. “But now are fighting for our lands and our tribes. We are not responsible for Isis. Look what has Maliki has done – look at the two million refugees. He has destroyed and killed – and where was the world then?”

Mr Suleimani was speaking in Erbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region, where he and a raft of other Sunni tribal leaders who have joined forces with Isis have been given sanctuary despite being wanted by the Iraqi government.

The Kurds are hoping the tribes will form the nucleus of a deal between the Sunnis and a new Iraqi prime minister, should Mr Maliki step down. He is currently under pressure to do both from factions within his country and from one-time allies like the United States.

However, the tribal leaders have given an unbending view of the role of the central government, making clear that like the Kurds they would support the break-up of Iraq into three states, Shia, Sunni and Kurdish.

They insist publicly that Isis, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, is playing only a minor role in the insurgency and that they can easily “deal with them” once they have forced a political solution that gives them greater autonomy and ends what they say is harassment of Sunnis by security forces.

Mr Suleimani, whose extended family runs to some three million people, is one of a number of senior tribal leaders in Iraq who wield vast political and military clout. Many command private armies of followers, for whom loyalty to the tribe generally trumps loyalty to central government, and even the late Saddam Hussein generally found it easier to court them rather than confront them.

The question, however, is how long their alliance of convenience with Isis is likely to last – and whether it will be as easy for them to get rid of Isis as they claim.

Another tribal sheikh admitted privately he would now need help to take on Isis after the group seized large quantities of American weapons from Iraqi army bases. Isis also fight with unparalleled ruthlessness, and its member have recently photographed themselves killing hundreds of prisoners and conducting sectarian rampages against the Shia and Turkmen minority communities of northern Iraq.

While some Sunnis have welcomed Isis, saying they have brought order and resumed social services abandoned by the Maliki government, the same “honeymoon” period was witnessed in areas of eastern Syria that the group occupied last year.

Now Isis forces in eastern Syria are administering brutal forms of sharia justice, executing captives who have fought against it or committed crimes. Over the weekend, eight men from more moderate rebel groups were killed and had their bodies “crucified” – put on public display in cruciform position for three days – in Deir Hafer, a village east of Aleppo.

Another man survived being crucified for eight hours in another town, al-Bab, for “giving false testimony”, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

It was similar acts of brutality by Isis’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, that alienated many tribes which had originally fought alongside it against the US occupation, including Mr Suleimani’s.

They then led the so-called “Awakening” that put al-Qaeda on the run by the time the Americans withdrew. But when Mr Maliki stopped paying the salaries of Awakening foot-soldiers, Mr Suleimani and others turned against him, organising protests last year.

When Mr Maliki sent in troops to close down sit-ins, killing scores of people, the tribes declared the western province of Anbar “liberated”, with Isis support. Isis leaders even stayed at the farm of another leader who had been a prominent local head of the Awakening, Mr Suleimani said.

Mr Suleimani gave a detailed description of ambushing an Iraqi security forces division sent to retake one of Anbar’s major cities, Ramadi, in January, surrounding them, taking their weapons and sending them home.

He also claimed that Isis’s takeover of Mosul had been made easier by many Iraqi soldiers quitting their ranks after being summoned home by their tribes.

He said there was still a chance to forge a reunited Iraq, with more autonomy for the Sunni tribal areas, but only if a new constitution were written and a government formed without Mr Maliki. “We demonstrated peacefully for our rights,” he said. “Mr Maliki said, 'these are not Iraqis, these are terrorists’ and he used that pretext to attack Sunni Arabs. We are only defending ourselves.”

Mr Maliki has until Tuesday to form a new, cross-sectarian leadership, a deadline he appears unlikely to meet. The war itself meanwhile seems to have reached a temporary stalemate. The insurgents have stalled in their advance on Baghdad, but appear to have resisted a government push to retake the city of Tikrit to the north.

Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri, the Iranian deputy chief of staff, said Iran would go further to help Iraq, offering the same strategic guidance as it had in neighbouring Syria, another key ally. “Iran has told Iraqi officials it is ready to provide them with our successful experiments in popular all-around defence, the same winning strategy used in Syria to put the terrorists on the defensive,” he told Iranian television.